Eurico Gonçalves

Born in 1932 in Abragão, Penafiel, this artist primarily worked in the field of painting, but was also a teacher and art critic, and a member of A.I.C.A. Within this context, they published several articles on topics such as the Plastic Expression of Children, Dadaism, Zen Philosophy, and Writing. They were a grantee of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris from 1966 to 1969. In 1971, they received an Honorable Mention for the Portuguese Art Criticism Award for Soquil. From 1972 to 1992, they were a member of the Governing Bodies of the National Society of Fine Arts. They received the Almada Negreiros Prize in 1998 and the Grand Prize of the Vila Nova de Cerveira Biennial in 2005. They authored the following books: Narratives of Dreams and Automatic Texts (1950-51), published by CPS in 1995; Children’s Painting and Us – Parents, Teachers, and Educators, 1978; Art Discovers the Child and the Child Discovers Art (4 volumes) and Dada-Zen/Painting-Writing, 2005. In their artistic journey, they went through an initial surrealist phase, rooted in Freudian theories of the fantastic, and then evolved into non-geometric and gestural abstractionism, which emphasizes the use of brushstrokes and impulsive free lines. As the artist themselves stated in 2003, this painting aims to “reduce itself to very little or almost nothing, in function of liberating emptiness”. They passed away in 2022 at the age of 90.